The Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) is a women's professional basketball league in the United States. It currently is composed of twelve teams. The league was founded on April 24, 1995, as the women's counterpart to the National Basketball Association (NBA). League play started in 1997; the regular season is currently played from June to September with the Finals in October.
Many WNBA teams have NBA counterparts and play in the same arena. The Connecticut Sun, Seattle Storm, and Tulsa Shock are the only current teams to play without sharing the market with an NBA team (although the Storm shared a market with the Seattle SuperSonics before that team's relocation). In addition to those three teams, the Chicago Sky is the only other team that does not share an arena with an NBA counterpart. The four aforementioned franchises, along with the Atlanta Dream and the Los Angeles Sparks are all independently owned. This independent ownership is important to the WNBA's growth; at one time, all teams in the league were owned by the NBA.
Read more about Women's National Basketball Association: Teams, The WNBA Draft, Regular Season, The WNBA Playoffs, The WNBA Finals, Players and Coaches, Rules and Regulations, Media Coverage, All-Time Franchise History
Famous quotes containing the words women, national, basketball and/or association:
“To be honest, I knew that there was no difference between dying at their years old and dying at seventy because, naturally, in both cases, other men and women will live on, for thousands of years at that.... It was still I who was dying, whether it was today or twenty years from now.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievments must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“... a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself cannot stand upon it.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)